Free The Love Children by Marylin French Page B

didn’t even let her finish. He boomed, “It’s a law that you be covered up, yes, smart-ass, now shut your mouth or I’ll arrest you!” She was so shocked, she shut up. The four of us looked at each other and just got up and walked to my house. We didn’t feel safe outside.
    In any case, we were getting older and had to start thinking seriously about ourselves. For years, we’d discussed questions like infinity versus finity and what was outside the universe, if anything, and the existence of god and the nature of evil, but we’d never thought about what we’d do day to day for the rest of our lives. We assumed that would take care of itself, and suddenly it came to us that it would not.
    Most of the boys I knew were scared. They were nervous even talking about their alternatives, because they weren’t sure what was legal and what wasn’t. They thought they could get arrested just for talking about getting out of the draft, and they were unsure about the rights and wrongs of doing that. Was it morally acceptable to go to college to escape the draft, or to Canada? Was it unpatriotic? Was it all right to drop out, or cut off a finger or a toe, or claim to be a conscientious objector? Did you have to enlist and kill Vietnamese to be a good American? Because, of course, however defiant people sounded, everybody really
wanted to do the right thing, to be patriotic. But how could it be right to kill people for no reason at all? People felt they would be cowardly if they tried to escape the draft, and they didn’t want to be cowardly, but they also didn’t want to go to a place they had no reason to go to, to kill people who hadn’t done anything to them—innocent people, babies, grandmas, hardworking farmers. And a lot of the boys knew they’d be killed there. Had they been born and loved by their parents and fed and taught and grown up healthy and strong just to be killed in a war over nothing?
    Going to Canada seemed almost as bad as going to war. They’d have to leave their families, their friends, their neighborhoods behind, they might never see them again. They’d have to live in a place where they knew no one, getting whatever low-paid job they could find without training or legitimacy, and without being sure they’d ever be able to come home again.
    Dropping out was the worst. They’d have to run away, like criminals, and live furtively until the war was over, and maybe they wouldn’t be able to come home even then but have to live marginal lives, on the streets. These were middle-class boys, they slept in comfortable beds with clean sheets and ate three good meals every day and had no useful knowledge of how to survive in the great big dark world outside.
    A few boys bragged that they were going to enlist, maybe hoping we’d admire their courage. But when they announced this, their voices sounded hollow. They weren’t sure whether enlisting made them heroes or villains in the eyes of other kids. In my crowd, it made them villains. We hated war, and we turned away from them. Looking back now, I see that for us it was a matter of class. Those boys who thought they were doing the right thing by enlisting were the ones who were sacrificed. They went, and they hated what they did and learned to hate themselves. An awful lot of them got hooked on dope; some couldn’t live with the terrible
things they’d been taught to do. They came back ruined people with ruined lives. And for what? To bolster the egos of a few people in Washington who were sorry later on anyway.
    People edged into wildness. Everybody was ready to explode. In New York, the great writer Grace Paley spent six days in jail for sitting down in front of a police horse. Middle-class people were sent to jail for counseling young men about the draft; young men were jailed for burning draft cards.
    At Barnes, kids protested the curriculum, saying it was irrelevant. They